Sunday, March 29, 2009

by James Parks, Mar 18, 2009Trade experts from throughout the Americas say U.S. trade policies must be completely revised and existing agreements renegotiated and agree with the Obama administration’s proposal to renegotiate part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that allowed unsafe Mexican trucks to drive on U.S. highways.

In a forum hosted by the International Labor Rights Forum, the Global Policy Network and the Economic Policy Institute, trade union leaders from the United States, Mexico, Central America and Colombia said that existing and proposed trade agreements have failed to live up to their promise and have actually made things worse.

During the negotiation of NAFTA, critics claimed that many small businesses that maintain most of Mexico’s employment, would close and that the agreement would create lower salaries and unstable work conditions. Fifteen years later, many of the criticisms have become a reality.

A big problem with NAFTA and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is that neither protects workers’ rights. Bama Athreya, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum, said:

Twenty-five years of experience promoting labor rights conditions in trade agreements has shown us that we need better ways to measure progress and better tools to hold governments accountable for protecting workers’ rights.

It’s a major mistake to believe that labor rights are protected under CAFTA. The intention was always to protect trade and investments and not labor rights. Today we have the possibility to correct this mistake.

Participants in the forum also called on the U.S. government to drop consideration of a proposed trade agreement with Colombia. Francisco Ramirez Cuellar, president of Sintraminercol, Colombia’s coal miners’ union and a human rights activist, puts it this way:

If the U.S. and Canadian governments approve the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, they would be legitimizing the crimes against Colombian labor leaders, crimes that occur on average once every three days. Those that are responsible are basically the corporations and the governments, the same groups that would be the first to benefit from the agreement.

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for union members. The Colombian government has not vigorously investigated or prosecuted the killing of trade union members. At the current pace of investigations and trials, it would take 37 years to prosecute the backlog of cases. And the caseload is growing—the rate of killings, which had fallen for a few years, jumped sharply last year by 25 percent.

Meanwhile, as part of the omnibus fiscal year 2009 appropriations bill, Congress banned unsafe Mexican trucks on U.S. highways. The Bush administration ignored a congressional ban on Mexican trucks operating beyond the 25-mile commercial zone around the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Transportation Department’s inspector general reported on Feb. 6 that despite repeated assurances that the federal inspectors would “check every truck, every time” it crossed the border, the Transportation Department couldn’t determine whether such inspections had occurred.

Teamsters President James Hoffa says the “driving public is put at risk when trucks from Mexico that don’t meet U.S. standards are allowed to roam our highways.

The Mexican government has not held up their end of the bargain to meet U.S. standards. Mexican trucks are unsafe and Mexican drivers are not required to meet the same criteria that American drivers must meet to earn a commercial driver’s license. It’s long past time to close the border to these unguided missiles.

Mexico is planning to increase duties on $2.4 billion of U.S. exports of commodities like wheat, beans, beef, and rice in retaliation for the truck ban. Jane Winebrenner writes in the Daily Labor Report the Obama White House has asked for new legislation to create a new trucking project that meets the concerns of Congress and the union movement.

The expansion of Mexican trucking in the United States was negotiated under the 1994 NAFTA.